In the Shadow of Alabama

by Judy Reene Singer

  “Pretty soon she’ll be arrow-straight,” Malachi predicts. “You’ll never know she was windswept. But we got to get Lisbon out of there before Maja kicks him to little pieces.”

  “She won’t kick him,” I reply. “She knows that he’s just a friend.”

  “She could break one of his legs.” Malachi seems not to hear me. “Or he could hurt the filly foal. A protective mama is a force to be reckoned with.”

  “They’ll be okay,” I insist. “They know the rules. You know how you always talk about the rules and how horses are full of rules.” And I cross my fingers behind my back because I’m not sure what the rules are anymore.

  It seems there are rules made by nature. Tomatoes bloom around the same time; cherries grow on trees. Spring always brings new buds and baby animals. There are rules for when lilies grow and die. Rules that keep planes in the sky, and rules that turn vibrations into music.

  I understand all that.

  But the other rules, the rules made by humans, don’t seem to be rules at all. They are just decisions, passed along, like the decision that kept Willie from sharing quarters with the white soldiers or that kept him sitting on a hot train while the rest of the men ate in a restaurant. Those aren’t rules; they are whims and notions that spring from hateful ignorance.

  When Lisbon decided not to fight back because of the humans who had beaten him, he had made a rule for himself.

  And then I realize. Not all rules have to be followed.

  * * *

  David and I are talking in code.

  He is home and looking tired and a bit rumpled. Even like that, he looks so good to me: straight, sandy-brown hair falling across his eyes; full, arched lips and high cheekbones that make him look a little like a blond American Indian. I need to touch him, to run into his arms and kiss him until we can’t breathe, but I remind myself of Puerto Vallerta. And how many times his phone went to voice mail. Wasn’t it his choice to end our relationship and start another? Instead, I let him peck me on the cheek and hate myself for my silence. His words are guarded. Mexico was good, work was good, the farm looked good. It was a good idea to hire Danielle. How was Boston?

  “Good,” I reply.

  “Would you be open to a discussion this weekend?” he asks me.

  “If there’s something you want to tell me, tell me now,” I reply, trying to keep the edge out of my voice.

  He is a little taken aback by my brusqueness. “I thought we might talk out some issues. Really talk to each other. We’ve both been preoccupied lately, but I thought we could talk.”

  “Don’t apologize for being busy,” I say, then blithely add, “I’ll be busy, myself. I’m leaving for Boston again day after tomorrow. Plan to stay for a few days. Maybe we can pencil in a talk after that.” There is sarcasm in my voice, which is the way I handle anger.

  “I see,” he says. There is a tone in his voice that I haven’t heard before. “Well, I guess I’ll be seeing you around. Let me know when you get back.”

  “Will do.”

  He cocks his head to one side but says nothing more. For some odd reason, I feel relieved. Like I haven’t betrayed my true self, haven’t broken my own rules. And then suddenly I feel awful. Have I hurt him enough for trying to love me? I didn’t want to. I don’t want to. Yet I can’t stop it. How do you make new rules?

  * * *

  That night I reach out and touch him, but he wraps the blankets tightly around his body and turns away, leaving me to lie awake and hate myself all over again. I think back to when I was fifteen, just before I ran away to college. I never dated. My father used to take aside every boy I brought home, hoping for a night out at a movie or miniature golf.

  “Why do you want to take my daughter out?” he would ask. “What do you see in her? She’s nothing special, you know. Why would you want to go out with her? I think you just want to get in her pants.”

  Mortified, horrified, I would die inside a thousand times over, and embarrassed, the boy would leave. Sandra would always lie that she was going out with a girlfriend and met her dates around the corner. She managed to have quite a few boyfriends and got a lot of action that way. I envied her skills. And her courage.

  Maybe my father was truly curious when he questioned my dates. Maybe he was filled with concern for me, but I feel like I am still waiting for the boy to answer. Maybe I am answering for him, but the answer is never good.

  * * *

  David and I have coffee together the next morning and make no reference to the previous night. I ask him to keep an eye on the farm while I am in Boston, because I am getting nervous about Malachi. Danielle has informed me that several times she found the water pump left on because Malachi had forgotten about it. It’s more important than it first sounds. If the pump is left on, the hoses could burst and flood the barn.

  It shouldn’t be all that difficult to keep an eye on things, I tell David. I have Danielle, to feed the horses and put them out into their paddocks in the morning, and to clean stalls and be my eyes during the day. David just has to supervise. Make sure that the horses are all upright before he leaves for the city, and still upright, in their stalls, when he comes home at night. He nods, grabs his briefcase, and leaves for work.

  Later that morning his grandmother calls to ask me how I liked Mexico. She is eighty-eight and in an assisted-living facility. “I called to congratulate you, dear.”

  “For what?”

  “Oh,” she says. “David mentioned that he was planning to get engaged in Mexico. I sent him my mother’s garnet and diamond ring. He was very excited about the trip when I last spoke to him.”

  “I didn’t go,” I tell her.

  She is surprised. “He sounded so definite.” She sighs. “I would love for you kids to get married while I’m still alive.”

  “Well,” I joke, “you saw his brother get married twice. That should make up for David.”

  * * *

  I am riding Lisbon. On every side of me, there are woods. The deer slip in and out of ocher trees like whispers, brown against brown; their gray chests, tan legs, upright necks, and dark brown backs look like strips of bark, blending into the cloak of trees. Nature hides them well. Lisbon and I glide easily along the path, my scent disguised by the scent of my horse. The deer continue to eat undisturbed, even though Lisbon is such a contrast, a slash of white against the warp and weave of brown and ocher. His stark, glistening silver white plays counterpoint against the harmony of the woods. Rabbits scutter and zigzag in front of us, unconcerned. I talk to him while we ride. I tell him that I love him and ask him to trust me. It took me almost two years before I was able to brush his face, touch his forelock. He had been beaten across his head with a pole before I got him; there is still a dent in his skull from his early brutal training, and he would bolt backward every time I tried to touch his face. It was two years before he was able to drop his head and let me touch it. Two years of torturously slow work. And when I thought I had finally gained his trust, he would reel back as soon as he saw my hand move toward his face. I cursed those people who had done this, who had betrayed the innocence of his soul.

  “Back off,” Malachi would tell me. “Back off. Let him figure things out himself. Let him miss your touch for a while.”

  And though it hurt me, though my hands craved to touch Lisbon’s head and ask him to stretch it down to me, I left him alone. Grooming him, I slipped him treats, talked to him, waiting so long for the day when he would believe in me.

  And then, one day, he just dropped his head on command, and let out a long, relieved sigh. I pulled his head to my chest and wept into the soft velvet hair that covered his face, and kissed his awful dent, and held him for a long time. I whispered to him, how brave he was to let me touch him. How brave, how brave, how hard love comes to some of us.

  * * *

  His trot has evened out to a glide as he reaches into the bit. His white ears flick back and forth, listening to the warning snort of a deer. His white, white neck st
retches into an arc of submission in front of me. And I am thinking, Lisbon’s wondrous flash of white is needed among the dark green leaves and brown trees and russet weeds. You need white to see the brown, to realize the contrast. You need the intrusion of light, so you can see and understand the dark. One defines the other. One needs the other.

  * * *

  Malachi is waiting when Lisbon and I return. His brown leather satchel is packed and standing outside his front door, as if to say “I mean it. I really am leaving.” There is a little tag attached to the handle. But Malachi himself is in the paddock with the new foal, wheedling her into walking.

  “Why don’t you just unpack and stay?” I call over him while I unsaddle Lisbon.

  “Just getting things ready, missy,” he calls back. “I always like to be ready.”

  I study him, patient, and gentle with the foal. This is the man who will pick up a live wasps’ nest with a stick and drop it into the woods so as not to hurt them, who walks across the barn roof in lightning storms to clear the drains of leaves, who catches mice in one swoop of a brown paper bag to let them loose, away from the barn. This is the man who, when I took a horse in for retraining because he wouldn’t stand still for saddling or mounting, leapt onto the animal’s bare back and stood straight up with his arms out to the side like he was a circus act and declared, “I don’t think you’ll have a problem with him.”

  “I always thought you were the bravest person I know,” I say, as he snaps a soft rope through the foal’s halter and jogs off. The mare raises her face from her hay and trots close behind him. “And the kindest.” He looks over at me, surprise in his face. I take another breath. “You’re the one who sent me to Phoenix, to my father. You gave me the courage to do it.”

  “Why was you so afraid to go?” he calls back, puffing now from the exertion, then coughing hard, but the foal is trotting pretty straight.

  “I was afraid to watch him die,” I reply, which is true. I had never seen death before. And I had already tried to make peace with my father by swallowing his bitterness and making it my own, so we would have something in common. It didn’t work. It only poisoned me.

  “Besides,” I remind Malachi, “you made me go.”

  He considers this.

  “Stay,” I add. “It’s my turn to help you.”

  He caresses the foal’s back as though she were his child, too.

  “Please?”

  “You can’t help me,” he says softly. “But I’ll stay as long as I can.”

  “When is your sister coming?”

  He adjusts his tan cap. “Don’t exactly know. And that’s all I aim to talk about it.” He leads the foal away. The conversation is over.

  “Well, I need to go to Boston for a few days,” I call after him. “I’m taking a night flight day after tomorrow. How about you call me when your sister arrives and I come home right away?”

  He stares at the foal as she nurses. He watches me as I deliberately take Lisbon and lead him into the paddock with the mare and foal and turn him loose. Lisbon walks to a pile of hay. The mare raises her head and pins her ears at him, then takes a step or two, pretending to charge him. He pins his ears back and I hold my breath, but it all comes to nothing. Malachi’s eyes meet mine.

  “I would like you to stay if you can,” I say. “I can’t trust anyone else.”

  “I suppose you can’t,” he agrees softly. “I’ll do my best.”

  * * *

  Willie calls again to make sure that I am really coming as promised. “I am waiting for you,” he says.

  “I’ll be there, but for now, I need to get some work done.”

  He sighs. “We had such baby faces,” he says, trying to engage me. “You know?”

  I think back to the old pictures in the box and agree. The faces are all too young, black faces, cheeks and foreheads reflecting white from the flash of the camera, their eyes holding a moment of blaze. Young faces that are somehow not youthful; the eyes are too closed off, too guarded.

  “Did you see your dad’s picture?” he asks. “He was in there.” That’s why he really called.

  “Yes, I did,” I say with forced enthusiasm. “Yes, I did.”

  “And Jink,” he adds. “We took a picture of him in the plane.” I have a quick flash of the picture Rowena had tucked away, of the laughing pilot with sandy hair. Willie stops talking for a minute, and I draw a breath, hoping it’s the opening I need to tell him I can’t talk right now.

  “They were all going out on night navigation training,” he continues.

  “Who were?” I ask, thinking, Here we go again.

  “The Brits,” he replies. “They had to get certified on night flying. You’re flying blind at night. Nothing but the sky and the stars.”

  Despite myself, he is drawing me into his world again. I can picture it. The black night sky above, with not nearly enough light to steer by. Only an interminable length of darkness, a void, stretching out in front of you, without end.

  “Is this near the end of your story?” I suddenly feel impatient. I don’t need to hear all of this winding, endless loop. My father’s gone. This is the history of old men. My first mistake, really, was to go off to Boston the first time, and now I see myself as a captive audience whose purpose is simply to keep an old man amused. I have to draw this to a close. This time when I get to Boston, I will tell him my time is limited. And I can’t come back.

  “Yep, flying blind,” Willie adds. “It’s tricky business.”

  “Yes,” I agree. “By the way, I’m taking a night flight to come see you. We can talk when I get there.”

  “Sorry you’re flying at night,” he apologizes. “The night sky keeps its secrets, you know. You can’t trust the night. Tricky business.”

  And I think about Malachi wanting to leave, me wanting David without the risk of loving him, Willie needing to tell me things that maybe I need to hear.

  All those needs.

  It’s tricky business.

  Chapter 24

  I’m not crazy about the way Willie looks. I came right from the airport to see him. He is in his wheelchair, waiting for me, thinner, his movements slower. I put the package of tapioca I had brought from home on his lap.

  “Thank you, darlin’,” he says, looking eminently satisfied. “You made an old man very happy. Is there a spoon?” There is. I give him a plastic spoon from the plane.

  He smiles. “Don’t tell the nurse. This is our little secret.”

  * * *

  “The nights are too quiet.” Jink put his bottle of Scotch on the ground next to where he was sitting, pushed a piece of hair back, clasped his hands behind his head, and leaned into them. The pale green radium dial on the wall clock gave the office a ghostly look. Its luminescence played across his face, sharpening his cheekbones and cutting worry lines into his forehead. The men sat in the emerald shadows and drank quietly. “I don’t trust quiet nights.”

  “Are you complaining?” Fleischer asked him. “You need a couple of Messerschmitts over the base to liven things up?” They were drinking with high hopes of getting “blotto,” as Jink had optimistically put it. A few weeks ago, Fleischer had prevailed upon Seekircher to write up extra duty orders so that he and Willie could work on the Vultee problem, though the orders mostly served to make them look industrious while getting them out of the barracks at night. They were risking court-martials, they knew, if they were caught drinking, but it was worth it. It was the only time Fleischer could allow himself to relax, and it gave Willie the opportunity to talk music and Jink to talk flying.

  The sound of planes overhead rattled the hangar. “Canadians,” said Jink, looking up at the metal ceiling, as if he could see through it. “They’re getting qualified on night navigation.”

  “Got a craptogram that you guys are on the line for tomorrow night,” Fleischer commented, making reference to a rumor whose source was the latrine.

  “None too soon.” Jink’s voice had a catch of excitement. “Soon as I q
ualify, they’ll be sending me home to fight.”

  “Welshland?” Willie half-jokingly asked. He wasn’t all that sure where a Welshman actually came from.

  “Wales. Swansea,” Jink explained, his voice softening with memory. “Twenty-two Graiglwyd Road, that’s my address. I hope my family’s still there. With the bombings and all.”

  “They all talk like you?”

  Jink laughed. His voice echoed against the metal walls and fell off into the darkness. “Worse. They speak Cymraeg—Welsh.” He pronounced it Comrye-eeg; Willie made him repeat it four or five times because he couldn’t get it. Jink took another swig from his bottle and belched. “Wish I was home, for sure.”

  Willie had never known anyone like Jink. He was everything Willie wanted to be, and knew he never would—could be—independent, free, indifferent to authority, indifferent to criticism. Lindsey Jink Davies was his own man. Even in the skies, he was his own man. Especially in the skies; he defied the skies.

  “Either one of you miss home?” Jink asked.

  “No,” Fleischer replied right away. “I have nothing there except Ruth, who may or may not be my girl.” His voice was low, heavy with thought. “My parents sent me to New York to live with an aunt when I was eleven. They’re still in Poland. Most of my family is still in Poland.”

  “Well, I suppose I miss New York,” said Willie. He missed Harlem. The knots of people who walked in the streets, who strolled along without watching to step off the curb, people who said things he understood. He missed the African Methodist Episcopal Church his mother attended on Wednesdays and Sundays wearing her big pink hat, and he missed the restaurants where a man, even a colored man, could sit wherever he wanted and eat.